11 years!

Looking down Silver Spring Avenue towards downtown Silver Spring. Photo by the author.

One of my favorite things to do is go for long walks around downtown Silver Spring, whether with my partner or a friend or, occasionally by myself.

It's been eleven years since I started Just Up The Pike (and twenty-six years since my family moved to Montgomery County). We almost always run into somebody I or we know, and they usually have an update about their life or a bit of local gossip or simply say hi. My boyfriend groans because it means we have to stop for a minute and he likes to keep walking.

I was eighteen when I started this blog and had no real idea of where things would go, and each year on June 26 I take a minute to reflect on it. This blog changed my life. It shaped (and continues to shape) my perceptions of the world. It shaped my career, and as I sought out new topics to research and write about, it reshaped my career multiple times. It's brought me friends online and off.

Occasionally, it has brought me some notoriety. Frequently (more than you may believe, and quite a lot this spring) I question myself and whether this is still worth doing. When that happens I try to remember the speech at the end of "Amputations" by Death Cab for Cutie (taken from motivational speaker Glenn W. Turner), which ends:

"In this modern day and age we have instant coffee and instant tea--instant disbelief. Thats the reason we will never become anything--it is because we will never believe in ourselves. We will always listen to the mass majority. If everybody's making fun of you and criticizing you, then you know you're on the right track. Cause most people ain't got it."

I am thankful for each and every one of you who has read this blog and supported me over the past eleven years. I don't think you know how much that means (and continues to mean) to me.

In any case, I would like to celebrate this birthday with y'all at some point this summer. Please keep an eye out for an announcement soon.

ride on's most popular routes aren't where you expect them to be

Montgomery County’s Ride On is the busiest bus system in the DC area after Metrobus, carrying 75,000 riders each day. Its most popular bus routes, however, might surprise you.

A Ride On bus in Germantown. Photo by the author.

Here’s a map of the ten most heavily used Ride On routes in Montgomery County. They all have a couple of things in common, which can tell us a lot about the state of transit in the county.

These are the most popular Ride On bus routes. Map by the author using data from MCDOT.

For starters, many of these routes have simple, easy-to-remember routes, a key feature for growing ridership. The 46 (Rockville-Medical Center) and 55 (Germantown-Rockville) both run on Route 355 with few deviations. The 100 (Germantown-Shady Grove express) follows I-270, making one stop in Germantown and another at the Shady Grove Metro station. Riders don’t need to be intimately familiar with each route in order to use it. They just need to know where that street goes.

In addition, most of these routes are pretty frequent, running all day, every day, and every 15 minutes or more during rush hour. That means riders can rely on them at all times, without worrying how they might get home if they miss the last bus.

Where these 10 routes go, however, might be the most interesting part. Three of them, the 15, 16, and 20, run between Silver Spring and the Takoma-Langley Crossroads area, a dense corridor with tens of thousands of residents, shops, and jobs. It’s also where the Purple Line will go, demonstrating the there’s a lot of demand for transit here.

A map of Ride On's Route 46, which has a pretty clear, easy-to-follow route along Route 355.

But five of the routes, the 46, 55, 59, 61, and 100, all serve the Upcounty, the newest, most suburban, and most spread-out part of Montgomery County. The prevailing wisdom among some county officials is that transit “doesn’t work” in these areas, unlike the denser, more urban Downcounty, where all of the county's busiest Metrobus routes are. In the Upcounty, the roads are big and fast and you have to travel long distances to get from residential areas to jobs, shopping, or popular hangouts.

Yet these areas still manage to support frequent, heavily used transit service. There are thousands of car-free and one-car households in areas like Gaithersburg and Germantown who depend on transit. The Upcounty also has lots of places that people want to go to: Montgomery College and the Universities at Shady Grove; two hospitals; big shopping centers like Lakeforest and Milestone; and walkable, urban-ish neighborhoods like Rio/Washingtonian Center and Germantown Town Center.

That’s something to remember as the county considers building new transit lines to serve the Upcounty, like the Corridor Cities Transitway and bus rapid transit on Route 355 - as well as big highway projects like M-83 and adding new lanes to I-270. Driving rates in Montgomery County have stayed flat over the past 15 years, even as 100,000 new people moved here. And it’s because some of those people, even those coming to Germantown, took the bus.